The present invention relates to an information-processing apparatus, an information-processing method and a computer program. More particularly, the present invention relates to an information-processing apparatus and an information-processing method that are capable of increasing an advertising effect of distibution of advertisement contents to customers through a two-direction network, and relates to a computer program prescribing the information-processing method.
In recent years, there has been established a variety of services to distribute advertisement mails to registered customers. Such services to distribute advertisement mails each adopt an analysis method based on a data mining technique adopted in direct mailing by post.
The data mining technique is an advanced technique to search a large amount of data for a hidden cause-effect relation or a pattern, an advanced modeling technique or a decision-support technique which allows complex relations to be established among pieces of data and draws much attention for the past several years in fields such as artificial intelligence and data engineering.
It should be noted that there are various fields of the data mining technique. Examples of the data mining technique are a technique to determine what a customer will buy next by consideration of a past purchase record, a technique to predict when false credit cards will be used, a technique to determine a reason why a customer switches to a competitor, a technique to find a way to have such a customer give up the competitor and return to itself, an optimum technique to focus on potential customers in accordance with purchasing patterns and an aid to find solutions to these problems.
By the way, in a process to focus on customers, to whom advertisement mails are to be sent, by using the data mining technique, a rate of responses received from the customers can be estimated by creation of a graph called an assessment chart.
In addition, in order to increase the response rate, there is adopted a method whereby only most likely responding customers are selected on the basis of computed expected response probabilities and an advertisement mail is sent to only the selected customers. With this method, however, the number of sent advertisement mails decreases, raising a problem of a reduced response rate relative to all customers.
The following methods are adopted by an enterprise or the like making a request for distribution of an advertisement mail to determine an advertisement fee to be paid to an enterprise rendering a service to distribute advertisement mails:
(1) An exposure determination method based on the number of sent advertisement mails or the number of users inspecting a web page displaying the banner advertisement.
(2) A response-count determination method based on the number of accesses to a web page (an advertisement page) which are made by actually clicking a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) included in the advertisement mail or the number of accesses to a banner advertisement of a web page which are made by actual clicking operations.
Since the exposure determination method does not consider the number of users who actually click the URL to make accesses to the web page, however, a relation between the effect of the advertisement and the expense is not clear. Since the response-count determination method is based on an actual result indicated by the number of actual responses, on the other hand, there are raised problems that the advertisement cost cannot be determined in advance or, if the advertisement fee is set by making a contract based on a predetermined number of responses, the response count specified in the contract cannot be achieved or it takes a long time to achieve the response count.
When an advertisement mail is distributed after estimating a response rate by adoption of the conventional technique to create an assessment chart, however, there is raised a problem that a high actual response rate is not necessarily obtained.
In addition, the conventional technique to create an assessment chart is provided as a method to be used when a single content is distributed. There is also a problem that this conventional technique is not capable of creating an assessment chart, which is used for estimating a response rate with a high degree of accuracy when an optimum content is selected for each customer from a plurality of contents to be sent to the customer.